London / Art / Africa

Category Archives: Photography

The Africa Centre in collaboration with Capital Culture Gallery are hosting a photographic journey through the eyes of John Kenny. African Beauty is a collection of Kenny’s portraits of Africans in ‘traditional communities’, from the fringes of the Sahara to Angola and Namibia. Kenny’s work is very much that of an outsider looking in and can feel a tad National Geographic, anthropological as opposed to artistic. Agree? Disagree? If you’re in the mood to discuss you’re in luck because Kenny will also be hosting a couple of talks alongside his exhibition.

May is but two days away. Who asked for it to be May already? Can you believe how quickly this year is going? Onwards! Two exciting African in Art in London events begin this week.

Leonce Rapahel Agbodjelou @ Jack Bell Gallery.

Untitled (Musclemen series), 2012

Agbodjelou is one of Benin’s most renowned photographers, the founder and director of the West African republic’s first photographic school and recently appointed president of Porto-Novo’s [Benin’s capital city] Photographer’s Association. This is Agbodjelou’s second time at Jack Bell and he will again be showcasing work from his Citizens of Porto Novo portraiture project. All Agbodjelou photos of his fellow Porto-Novo citizens bristle with the same mix of high-low tension, historic-modern energy. While last year the focus was his Demoiselles – topless damsels with masked faces wandering around a grand old colonial house, part body, part statue, part spirit, bathed in dark light. This year Musclemen take centre stage. They are a brighter presence, they wear wax fabric trousers and pose against colourful backdrops. They hold flowers and stand in ways that make their muscles pop.

The Images of Black Women Festival aims to increase the visibility of women of African descent in film. Over the course of nine days it hosts talks, workshops, art exhibitions and of course shows a lots of films directed by black women. The mainstream highlights are the UK premiers of Ava DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere and a screening of Pariah directed by Dee Rees starring Adepero Oduye.

The festival takes place across 5 London venues. A full programme of events can be viewed here.

Roelof Petrus van Wyk’s camera lens attempts to flip the focus of the colonial gaze. His images recall Golden Age Dutch portraits – all dark in background, subjects in concentrated light – and aim to explore whiteness. What whiteness is and what it means especially for young post-apartheid South Africans. White as other, whiteness to be pondered, prodded and understood.

From the Young Afrikaner series of photographs by Roelof Petrus van Wyk

Explaining the through-line inspiration for his work van Wyk says: “Part of the apartheid propaganda was that we the Afrikaners were the ‘chosen volk’, as in the bible. We’re not chosen. We are Africans. We are part of Africa and we are exploring what that identity means.”

Is this unprecedented? There are currently two solo exhibitions by artists from Benin in London. While Gérard Quenum’s current show at the October Gallery involves creepy but cute dolls and a whimsical take on transnational histories, across town at Jack Bell Gallery, there’s a somewhat different vision of Porto-Novo from photographer Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou. Demoiselles de Porto Novo features a crumbling Afro-Brazilian mansion, in which masked, semi-nude women pose rather uncomfortably. What it all means, I cannot say, but here are a few ideas from Jack Bell.

This Thursday evening, renowned South African photographer David Goldblatt is in conversation with artist duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin at the Barbican.

I was very moved by Goldblatt’s Ex-Offenders series at the Rencontres in Bamako last November, and some of you may have seen his work in London earlier last year at the V&A alongside the Figures and Fictions exhibition. I posted about the Broomberg/Chanarin show in Dublin this Spring here. A great combination, which should throw up some fascinating questions about photography in South Africa and beyond.

I’ve been meaning to do a post about the Santu Mofokeng slides currently on view at Tate Modern for at least a month. Now that I’ve finally got around to it, I can’t find the notes I took when I went to see it. Sorry. In brief, The Black Photo Album/Look at Me is a beautifully-installed, moving piece of work, exploring the social aspirations and self-image of working and middle-class black South Africans in the early twentieth-century. These smart, serious young tennis enthusiasts are just two of the individuals populating Mofokeng’s carefully arranged trawl through family photo albums. You can read more and view the images and texts on the artist’s website, but I really recommend going to see it in the gallery too – in the cave-like dark stillness, with the slides clunking past, it’s like looking down a tunnel to a hundred years ago.

Show: not sure how long it’s up for (several months at least) – check the website.

Romuald Hazoumè is back at October Gallery this summer with Cargoland, a solo show featuring new installations, sculpture and photography. Hazoumè is known for his quirky, amusing and politically cutting work highlighting the entanglements of everyday life and work in Benin with local, national, transnational and global flows of material goods and capital. To hear more about his work, go along to his gallery talk this Friday at 4pm.